Is There A Single Tea Party Platform?

Members of the Tea Party movement protest outside the Fairmont Hotel before President Obama arrives for a fundraiser May 25, 2010
(Justin Sullivan/Getty)

“
The Tea Party is more than a political rally, it's more like a community, like you'd get in a parking lot outside of a Grateful Dead concert.

— Matt Kibbe

Ever since April 15th, when Tea Party groups emerged around the country, the public has been hearing a lot about what—and at whom—Tea Party anger is directed. But as America heads into the midterms with dozens of candidates endorsed by local Tea Party groups on the ballot, it's time to take a look at what the Tea Party wants.

In other words, without a national party structure or official spokespeople, what is the best way to identify common planks of a Tea Party platform?

Matt Kibbe joins the show to discuss that question. He’s the president of conservative political group FreedomWorks, and the author of a book called "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto."

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Comments [6]

barb krone

it'll be interesting to see how the tea paty people fare in bringing the economy and jobs back to america. hopefully they can succeed, but i doubt it. perhaps if they had acted in a more bipartisan way with the president we could be further on our way to a recovery.

The majority of Tea Party supporters are normal people whose primary disagreement is with the pathway of self-destruction America is embracing. In addition to gaining control of spending, one of the greatest challenges of the new congress will be that of accepting newly elected Tea Party members. America needs principled leadership that will at least consider the will of the people. This is called for in a post http://www.christianretirement.com "Learn to Say No."

Again with the Fannie/Freddie bashing; clearly they were PART of the housing bubble, but they did not originate the loans - many illegal or at least unregulated - that preyed on some and allowed bad actors to game the system. Your so-called expert seems to forget that the Republican (and Democratic member) Congress gleefully joined in to expand home ownership during GW Bush's term as it fit in with the notion of the "Ownership Society."

Get with it: All of America is to blame, and the expectation of "doing nothing" and letting regulations give way to the all-powerful "invisible hand" of the marketplace will sustain the usual boom and bust cycles, leading to the very socio-economic insecurity that Tea Party acolytes are raging about now.

What is the relationship between individual freedom and population density? In 1790 the US population was about 4 million. Today, at about 300 million, there are 75 people where at the beginning of our country, there was only one. Seems to me that when one tries to fit more and more humans in the same space, some sort of oversight is necessary.

When our Founding Fathers framed the Constitutions over 200 years ago, we were a sparsely populated agrarian nation. I don't see why going back to their intentions, has any more relevance in our world today than trying to interpret the intentions of words in the "Bible."Everyone should read the Constitution. And, everyone has their own interpretation.

In the recent conversation where you interviewed a spokesman about the Tea Party, you passed over his comment about the term free market. In using that term, he built a case for individuals being one one side and government bureaucrats on the other. He also used that term to explain why the bail out was seen as a failure — that the individuals in the free market were not allowed to fail.

But the term free market has to be questioned. Those people in corporations that determine prices and salaries on a national level are hardly individuals. Neither are the entities like AIG or Lerner.

Why no questioned the source about why the term free market is allowed when it exists only in a lab and not in reality. Why support the group of corporate heads who act in collusion as opposed to support the government leaders?